


5 + 1, or... Clint Barton invading Fury's personal space.

by fiendingforthesunshine



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: 5 Times, 5 Times Plus 1, Clint Barton beginnings, Gen, Mentions of brainwashing, Post-Avengers (2012), Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, mentions of torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-13
Updated: 2016-02-13
Packaged: 2018-05-20 00:55:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5986801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiendingforthesunshine/pseuds/fiendingforthesunshine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Clint showed up in Nick Fury’s apartment and one time Nick Fury showed up in Clint’s apartment with a few guests.</p>
            </blockquote>





	5 + 1, or... Clint Barton invading Fury's personal space.

1.

“So this is the home of the infamous Nick Fury,” Clint muttered, picking up a book off the bookshelf, pretending to dust off the cover (pretending because Nick has cleaners that come once a week and they’re very good at their job) before setting it on top of the other books, out of place and sticking out. 

“Didn’t your parents ever teach you to put things back where you found them?” Nick responded drily, not moving from his spot in the kitchen watching the coffee slowly drip into his (new) coffee pot. 

Clint gives the book a lazy glance before shrugging, “Nope,” he let the P pop loudly in the room.

“They should’ve.”

Nick doesn’t ask why Clint Barton, supervisory agent of SHIELD and previous for-hire assassin, is in his apartment. He doubts he would get a truthful answer if he did. 

Nick does wonder why the man would go through all this effort just to make a mess of his Director’s apartment, though. 

“Something wrong with your accommodations on base, a little too clean perhaps?” Nick spares a glance at Clint who was now flipping through the vinyl under the entertainment center with something like feigned interest. 

Nick knows just enough about this new recruit to know that the man probably wants to give Nick the middle finger in response but is smart enough to rein it in in this current situation. 

“All the agents, Coulson, May and Hill, all of ‘em… they speak very highly of you and I just wanted to see where a guy like that lives.”

After losing what little interest he might’ve held in the vinyl records Clint shuffled over to the kitchen table and watched the coffee pot diligently. It’s almost one in the morning but Nick was never a fan of sleeping. Apparently neither is Clint. 

“I’m going to go ahead and assume they don’t know you’ve left the base,” Nick pulled down two mugs and handed one to Clint, “Don’t let this spread around base. I don’t make coffee for probationary agents.” 

Clint shrugged and watched as Nick poured the coffee into his mug and left just enough space to include a tiny bit of creamer from the coffee-mate bottle sitting on the counter. 

Once he was done he sat down and waited for Clint to make his coffee as well. Clint filled half the cup with coffee and then doused it with sugar and near enough creamer to overflow the cup. 

Clint sat back down at the kitchen table across from Nick and curled his fingers around the mug, “Thank you, director.” 

Nick just nodded, “I’ve been hearing good reports so far, Coulson is very proud that he was the one that got to bring you in,” Clint took a sip of his coffee-tinted creamer and shrugged. 

“I’m not the ‘Infamous Hawkeye’ for nothing, director.” 

Nick sat down across from Clint and took a sip of his own coffee, “I guess my only concern is,” he swirled the sugar and cream around with the spoon he’d kept in the mug, “Can the ‘Infamous Hawkeye’ follow orders when I need him to?” 

Nick hadn’t lied when he said the reports were good, he just hadn’t mentioned the overwhelmingly negative reports that often followed a mere few hours after the first. 

Agent refuses to finish assignment. 

Agent solved scenario with multiple risky maneuvers despite constant direction stating otherwise. 

Agent started food fight from a makeshift sniper nest in the living quarters. 

“I follow the important ones,” Clint blew on his coffee and sipped nearly half of it in one go while he waited for Nick to respond. 

“Which ones are important?” 

Clint set his mug down on the table and thought for a few moments, “Protect the assets in the field, don’t hit civilians, only bring Coulson blueberry bagels on Thursdays…” Clint trailed off when he caught the look on Fury’s face and grinned. 

“I would say those three are important as well… the next time you start a food fight though, Barton, I’m throwing you in the brig SHIELD built just for agents like you.” 

Nicky pretends not to see Clint’s middle finger.

 

2\. (Yes, this time is this short.)

The second time Clint Barton arrives in Nick Fury’s apartment he at least uses the front door. 

Nick thinks it probably has to do with the fact that one arm is in a sling and Clint is only doing a marginally good job at hiding a pretty severe limp. 

Nick puts on the coffee while Clint shuffles into the kitchen and sits gingerly down in one of the chairs. 

“The doctors are making Agent Coulson stay overnight and your apartment is closer to the base than mine,” Clint says by way of greeting, adjusting the sling around his arm and avoiding leaning too much into the back of the chair. 

“We’re not having a sleep over, Barton,” Nick responds, pulling out two mugs and sliding one in front of the agent. 

Clint just shrugs. 

 

3.

Clint Barton and codename Black Widow spent two weeks on the run before making a phone call to SHIELD from a payphone in South Africa. 

Clint Barton makes the call to not kill Black Widow and requests that she be taken into SHIELD instead. He makes this call in the middle of a firefight in a village south of Moscow and Sitwell tells him no. By the end of the fight three SHIELD agents are dead, Black Widow’s team is hacked to bits, and Clint and she are nowhere to be found.

When Clint makes the call SHIELD takes her in, not because they necessarily want to but because they can’t let her continue being the danger that she is. 

They take Clint back in because they need answers. 

Thing is, neither Black Widow nor Clint Barton have been talking. Almost like they somehow managed to have a powwow when they were supposed to be killing each other and decided to keep everything to themselves. 

After two days of silence Nick Fury goes home. 

Nick Fury is only marginally surprised to find Clint Barton and Black Widow sitting in his living room playing against each other using his chess set. 

“Coulson actually sleeps?” Nick asked, making sure they both see his sidearm and the flash of his knife in his coat as he walks past them into the kitchen. 

“Sitwell’s on watch duty for midnight shift,” Clint explained, moving one of his pieces forward.

Nick leans against the kitchen counter when he notices the coffee pot is already on and three mugs are already out and waiting. With nothing to do he lets his glance slide over the two near-fugitives sitting in his living room. 

Black Widow looked like she’d been fed and treated well, probably thanks to Coulson and his adaptability to most situations. If they weren’t going to kill her they could at least try and turn her before locking her up for good. 

Clint on the other hand looked worse for wear. Turning against SHIELD had its consequences and there are a lot of agents with heavy hands and strong opinions about guys like Clint who are always waiting for the chance to jump. 

“How long are you two going to give SHIELD the silent treatment?” 

“Her name is Natasha,” Clint muttered at the chess board, putting his hand on a piece and then taking it back before he moved a different piece on the other side of the board. 

“Excuse me?” Nick asked, pulling the coffee pot out and pouring it into the three mugs. 

“Black Widow, her name is Natasha and she was trained by the red room. They brainwash people there.”

“They brainwash people everywhere, Agent,” Nick responds, bringing the cups over and setting them on the coasters that line the side of the chessboard on the table. 

“Do we?” 

“If we did you wouldn’t have disobeyed a direct order and then gone to ground.” 

That elicits a scoff from Black Widow – Natasha – as she moves her chess piece; Clint too tired and too focused on his next move. 

They sit in silence for a few minutes until Natasha speaks, her accent not as noticeable as Nick would’ve thought, “I would like to work for SHIELD. Your base says they want to hire me, but I have…. What are they called?” 

She turns to Clint, searching for the English word and he mutters, “Conditions,” before finally moving his piece across the board. 

“Yes, I have conditions.” 

Nick pretends to ponder this for a moment, taking a thoughtful sip of coffee before shrugging, “What are your conditions?” 

“I can say no to missions.” 

Nick nods. 

“You have your men stop torturing Clint.”

Nick reaches out to shake her hand, “You have a deal.”

 

4.

“No.” 

Clint doesn’t try to defend himself, he just continues playing with the little ball of fluff sitting on the kitchen table. 

“I’m not taking the cat,” Nick says again. 

“The kids that were taking care of him named him Rocket,” Clint said the next time Nick spared a glance in the direction of Clint and the stray animal. 

“You can’t just keep bringing in strays and hoping that someone from SHIELD will keep them,” Nick mumbles as he goes through the motions of making coffee while Clint continues to snuggle the kitten like he’s wasn’t an internationally renowned assassin. 

“The only other stray I’ve brought in was Natasha, and that seems to be working out well so far,” Clint said when Nick brought over a mug of coffee, very purposefully avoiding the cat. 

“Natasha is not a helpless animal that needs to be fed everyday.”

Clint drops his head to bump it against the cat and then pretends to give it a sip of his coffee, “Just get one of those automatic dry-food thingies, have that lady downstairs feed him when you’re gone.”

Nick glares at the kitten, then at Clint, “I’m always gone.”

“Then the arrangement will work out fine, Rocket will love it here.”

Nick takes a long drink of his coffee and ignores the way his hands are already running through the cat’s fur.

 

5.

It’s two weeks after the battle before Nick Fury gets a real, tangible chance to leave his office and go home for more than an hour or two. Two weeks of paper work, two weeks of meetings, two weeks of way too fucking much mess to clean up on the streets of New York City. 

He takes the subway to the closest stop to his apartment and walks the rest of the way, unsurprised to see a figure standing in the doorway of his building. 

“The lady with all the birds that lives on the first floor won’t let me in,” they say, pushing off the wall of the building with their shoulders as Nick get’s closer and pulls out his keys. 

“Rocket ate one of her oldest birds a few weeks ago, I think she’s still pissed,” Nick finished unlocking the front door and keyed in his code to allow the door to open. 

Clint followed in close behind, unzipping his hoodie, “I hope he got some treats for a job well done.” 

“He got to eat the bird, I think that’s prize enough. Natasha has been looking for you, seems to think I’d know where you’d be,” Nick figures he should just cut straight to the chase. Clint doesn’t just show up at his apartment for shits and giggles. 

“I went to visit Coulson’s cellist in Portland, figured she should get to know the truth about what happened,” Clint responded, following Nick up the three sets of stairs to his apartment. 

“That’s nice of you,” Nick mutters, feeling the days of vending machine food and desk work in his legs as they move. 

“Yeah I thought,” Clint starts, “But I stopped halfway to Portland when I realized I don’t even know the truth.” 

“Agent Phil Coulson was killed in the line of duty two weeks ago, it’s the truth,” Nick isn’t surprised when Clint pushes past him in the doorway and throws himself down onto the couch, leaving Nick to get the coffee this time.

“That’s bullshit, don’t lie to me.” 

Nick shrugged to his coffee pot, “He was killed, that’s not a lie.” 

“Where’s his body, then?” Nick can see Clint intentionally dig his boots into the fabric of the couch, leaving light little dirt marks on the arm and part of the cushion. 

“That’s above your clearance level.” 

“When will it stop being above my clearance level?” 

Nick heaves a huge sigh, like the ones his mother used to give when Nick had too many questions and she was about to kick him out of the house to go play with his friends for the rest of the day, “When you actually tell the pysch department the truth about what happened.” 

“I tell the truth, I get to see Coulson?” Clint interprets, getting off the couch and coming into the kitchen to get in the way of the coffee making process. 

“That isn’t what I said.”

“You said I get to know where he is if I tell the truth, that’s what you said.”

Nick passes a mug over to Clint and tries not to imagine what the hallways of SHIELD will sound like after Clint finds out that Coulson has been in the same building as him, recovering, all this time. 

“That is what I said, get the sugar out of the cabinet, I’ll give you a ride back to base.”

 

+1.

Clint’s pretty sure going back to his old SHIELD issued apartment is a terrible idea. However, Clint has never been known for his brains before so he figures it would be ridiculous to start now. 

The building is cleared out, like people left in a hurry. Clothes still in the washer and dryer machines, the light in the lobby’s fish tank is surprisingly still on and the lights in the hallways haven’t been turned off. 

The building surely isn’t safe by any means but Clint doesn’t really know where else to go. 

Fury is dead (he thinks); Coulson is off in the unknown hopefully not twice-baked dead, the Avengers are stretched to the four corners of the freakin’ universe and SHIELD is gone. Just like that. 

Clint was in in Munich, taking a few days off between missions, when a replay of Eurovision was interrupted by video clips of the Triskelion crashing into the Potomac River at the cafe he was sitting in. 

Clint was in an Internet café two hours later when he realized exactly what that, and the information he was looking at on a free server, meant for him. 

The few days after that are a little blurry but running is a popular theme and so are guns. 

It takes Clint two months to work his way through Europe, over into Asia, across the ocean to California and across the US to the only place that’s been home since the circus left him. SHIELD. Or well. Hydra. Fuck. 

After spending a day rewiring the buildings security cameras to show on his living room TV Clint finally falls asleep on the floor near his bed, a knife in one hand and the remote control for the cameras in the other. 

He wakes up to the smell of coffee, which, okay, why not? 

Clint thinks about leaving his knife on the floor of his room but he also thinks about how good HYDRA is at getting in where people least expect it and tucks the knife in his waistband just in case. 

Whoever started the coffee maker in his kitchen is either not there anymore or is very quiet. Clint can’t even hear anyone breathing from the hallway that leads into the open space of the living room and kitchen. 

“Come out, Barton, we’ve got donuts,” someone, who sounded like Natasha, calls from the kitchen and Clint sighs, straightens up, and walks out into the open. 

She wasn’t lying. About the donuts or the fact she wasn’t the only person in Clint’s kitchen. 

Coulson was leaning against the counter sipping coffee out of one of Clint’s mugs and Fury was sitting at the kitchen table, his trench coat replaced with a leather jacket and his eye patch replaced with sunglasses. Inside. 

Clint walks past them and picked up a donut, looking around for the mug he used to have hidden behind a few plates in the cabinets, “You look stupid with sunglasses on inside, director,” he mumbled as he pulled the mug out from the back of the cabinet, “aren’t you supposed to be dead?” he added as an afterthought. 

After Coulson fake-died Clint made a rule to never believe that someone is dead unless he watched their body go into the ground or be set on fire. He hadn’t seen either of these happen with Fury therefore he didn’t really think he was dead. Really.

Or well. He’s less surprised to see Nick Fury in his kitchen now than he would’ve been two years earlier. 

“We figured you would ignore protocol and come back here,” Coulson is smiling behind his coffee cup as Clint shrugs, pouring what’s left of the coffee into his mug. 

“Didn’t know where else to go.” 

Natasha blinks into her mug, “You could’ve gone to Stark.”

“Stark,” Clint repeats. 

“We were hoping once we found you we could convince you to come there with us, we have a plan,” Nick. 

“Does that plan involve more coffee?” 

“As much coffee as you can dream of, and your feral cat, it’s currently tearing up all of Pepper’s nice upholstery,” Natasha offers, knowing that mention Rocket will get Clint’s ass into gear. 

“Well, shit. You could’ve led with that, let me get dressed.”

**Author's Note:**

> Go [here](http://showme-thesun.tumblr.com) if you want to see my tumblr. I don't post a ton but it's funny sometimes? And if you sent me prompts I might write stuff for you? Possibly? :)


End file.
